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Santa Clara Unified School District superintendent Bobbie Plough during a board meeting at the Santa Clara Unified School District in the district board room in Santa Clara, Calif. on Thursday, May 30, 2013. (Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group)

The Santa Clara Unified School District Board of Education meeting in the district board room in Santa Clara, Calif. on Thursday, May 30, 2013. (Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group)

The Santa Clara Unified School District Board of Education meeting in the district board room in Santa Clara, Calif. on Thursday, May 30, 2013. (Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group)

SANTA CLARA — Since a power shift in November, the Santa Clara Unified School Board has been accused of micromanaging, chiding and intimidating employees, usurping their roles and making abrupt decisions that muddled school operations.

Now, as the school year ends Friday, more than one-fifth of top staff, including Superintendent Bobbie Plough, two assistant superintendents and six principals, have decided to step down from their posts, many fleeing the once-respected district.

Critics blame the exodus on the board’s involvement in day-to-day operations, including directly hiring staff and allegedly harassing parents and employees. Generally, California school trustees are supposed to set policy and direct the superintendent. But “when they try to do the job of administrators, it makes it impossible for us to do our job,” said Mary Kay Going, an assistant superintendent who says she is reluctantly leaving the district after 26 years.

The controversy has spawned a Facebook page and a Change.org petition, with more than 1,500 signatures supporting a no-confidence vote for board members Christine Koltermann, Chris Stampolis, Ina Bendis and Michele Ryan. Stampolis and Ryan were elected in November.

Trustees deny they’re overstepping. “We have a board who wants to ask more questions,” board President Koltermann said. In a culture some might call insular, “it’s a change and adjustment.” And, she said, the critics themselves scare away those who disagree with them.

Parent Bruce La Fetra is not alarmed: “I’d expect a lot of staff turnover following a ‘throw the bums out’ election like we had.”

But former board candidate Anna Strauss disagreed. “The school district is just disintegrating before our very eyes.”

Santa Clara had been a stable district, a place people joined out of college and stayed their entire careers. Its 23 schools perform better than average, when compared with districts with similar demographics: Santa Clara students are 36 percent Latino, 24 percent Asian, 22 percent white, 8 percent Filipino and 10 percent others.

But the district faces challenges on both ends of the academic spectrum. Its Latino students are among the lowest-performing in the county, said Stampolis, who is optimistic about the district’s new superintendent, Stanley Rose III. “We need staff that want to embrace data analysis in a public way,” he said.

On the other hand, for years parents have pressed the district to open another school like its Millikin Elementary, the state’s highest-scoring school.

Bendis and her allies embrace that urgency.

That hurry, sometimes heedless of the planning and potential consequences, frustrates teachers and administrators. So has the board’s apparent penchant to overhaul practices itself, rather than ask its staff to resolve issues.

It wasn’t the merits of the proposal that angered critics, but the rush, with just one month’s notice — and the appearance that Stampolis, father of a Bracher fifth-grader, would gain by an immediate change.

Last month, a teacher complained Wilcox High didn’t offer enough computer science and robotics. Instead of asking school administrators to resolve the complaint, the board publicly labored over the construction of the school’s master schedule. Critics say it wasn’t a coincidence that the unhappy teacher, Karen Hardy, is a friend of majority trustees, and the campaign treasurer for two of them.

Most recently, Ryan publicly took to task Santa Clara High junior Sami Elamad, who in speaking about his popular principal resigning, referred to the board room as a “gas chamber.” Ryan sent the student’s comments to the Anti-Defamation League — because she took the term as derogatory to Bendis, who is Jewish — wrote about them on her Facebook page, and placed the league’s response on the next board agenda.

Meanwhile, administrators quietly discussed ways to use the speech in ways to improve classroom discussions on prejudice, discrimination and bigotry. Why, critics wondered, would a trustee circumvent the staff and instead embarrass a student and create additional drama?

Beneath the uproar, the sides don’t necessarily disagree about goals or ideas. Most board members aren’t malicious, teacher Barbara Bicknell said. However, “they appear to be looking at data but subtracting out the humanness of the children.”

In discussing how best to educate kids, “There’s a way to have that dialogue and both be on the same side of the table,” Going said. “I don’t want to be ‘us against them.’ I want to be us for us. We should all be focused on the students.”

But board-staff trust is in short supply.

The upheaval has made it difficult to hire a top business official, a job vacant for half a year.

And at Bracher School, many teachers have been “working to rule” — not performing tasks like after-school tutoring outside of their contract — in part to protest Stampolis’ role heading the school site council, which among other things recommends how campus funds are spent.

Bendis said she goes into detail in questioning, partly because she doesn’t always get a clear answer. She sometimes sounds as if she’s interrogating administrators. In a curriculum discussion in January, she appeared to accuse Going of lying.

Bendis, who has medical and law degrees and a Ph.D. in molecular biology, visits classrooms “to get a sense of pedagogical styles used.”

While she said she doesn’t go where she’s not welcome, former Santa Clara Superintendent Rod Adams said he had to rein in Bendis after she was elected in 2006 and would visit schools and district offices unannounced and demand extensive reports.

“It became a nightmare,” said Adams, who retired in 2008. “She became such a nuisance I had to tell her not to talk to staff.” Later the board passed policies to limit its members from commanding staff and require appointments for school visits.

But fear of trustees persists. Anne McDermott, Briarwood School principal who is retiring early, said, “You never know when they’re going to show up on your site and insert themselves into the running of the school.”

Sharon Noguchi covers preschool through high school for the Bay Area News Group. She's written about teen stress, high-school cheating, Common Core and teacher tenure. She also runs workshops aimed at developing high school journalists.

Otto Warmbier was arrested in January 2016 at the end of a brief tourist visit to North Korea. He had been medically evacuated and was being treated at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center when he died at age 22.